Technical SEO Consultant, UK

The platforms and catalogs behind UK sites

UK commerce runs on a wide mix of platforms: Shopify for many direct-to-consumer brands, WooCommerce on WordPress for smaller retailers and service firms, Adobe Commerce for larger catalogs and a growing number of headless builds that pair a JavaScript front end with a commerce or content back end. Each produces duplicates in its own way, from collection paths and tag archives to layered navigation parameters and client-side routes that answer every request with a normal status.

Behind the storefront there is often a back-office system. Wholesalers and manufacturers frequently push products, prices and stock from Sage, Microsoft Dynamics, Odoo or a specialist inventory tool into the website on a schedule. That sync decides more about technical SEO than most teams realize. If a product rename changes its URL, a redirect is needed. If discontinued lines keep their pages with an empty template, they become soft errors. If every variant gets its own indexable page, categories fill with near-copies.

I review the website and the sync together, so the fix lands in the right place: sometimes in the theme, sometimes in the integration and sometimes in how product data is maintained. The ecommerce SEO page covers category structure, and my ERP work in the UK covers the back-office side.

Cookie consent, tag weight and what they do to performance

Most UK sites show a cookie banner because UK GDPR and PECR shape how non-essential cookies and similar technologies may be used. The consent platform behind that banner is a script like any other, and it usually loads early. A heavy or poorly placed consent script can delay the largest content on the page, add layout shift when the banner appears and hold back other tags until a choice is made.

I review how the consent layer behaves technically:

• When the consent script loads and whether it blocks rendering
• Whether the banner reserves its space or pushes content down after loading
• Which tags fire before and after consent, and whether any fire when they should not
• How Google consent mode, if used, changes what analytics and ad platforms record
• How many marketing pixels remain from past campaigns and can be retired

The output is a set of tickets that reduce script weight and layout shift without breaking measurement. Whether the configuration meets UK GDPR and PECR is a legal question, and I recommend confirming that with your data protection advisor. Measurement gaps caused by declined consent are documented, so reporting is read with the right caveats. Deeper performance work follows the method on the Core Web Vitals consulting page.

Product markup, VAT-inclusive prices and merchant listings

Prices shown to UK consumers are generally expected to include VAT, while trade and wholesale sites often show prices excluding VAT with a toggle. That difference matters for structured data. If the visible price includes VAT but the markup carries the net figure, or a VAT toggle changes the page price without changing the markup, search engines receive conflicting signals and merchant listings may be disapproved. Your accountant should confirm the correct price presentation for your business; my job is to make sure the site states it consistently.

For product templates I check that structured data matches the visible page for price, currency, availability, condition and variants, and that shipping and returns details are present where they apply. I then compare the markup with what your feed sends to Google Merchant Center, because the two often come from different systems and drift apart.

Service businesses need the same discipline with Organization and LocalBusiness markup: one consistent business name, registered address where appropriate, opening hours and contact details matching the Business Profile and website footer. The schema markup consulting page explains how I specify JSON-LD by template, so developers implement it once and it stays correct after future releases.

UK and Irish versions that look like duplicates

Many UK businesses serve Ireland, either from the same site with a currency switch or from a separate Irish store. Technically, that creates two versions of the same English pages that differ only in price, currency and delivery details. Search engines can treat them as duplicates, pick one as canonical for both countries and show sterling prices to Irish searchers or the reverse.

The technical checks are specific. Each version needs its own URLs, not a cookie or parameter that swaps currency on a single address. Canonical tags must point to the version itself, not across to the other country. Hreflang for en-GB and en-IE must be reciprocal and point only at indexable pages. Structured data and feeds must carry the right currency for each version. If a Shopify setup runs separate stores, product handles and redirects need to stay aligned when products are added or renamed.

Hosting and caching can interfere too. A CDN that caches one country's page and serves it to the other, or an IP-based redirect that keeps crawlers away from the Irish version, undoes everything else. The strategy questions, such as whether Ireland needs its own pages at all, are covered on the UK international SEO page and from the Irish side on the Ireland technical SEO page.

Redesigns, domain moves and working with your agency

Technical SEO in the UK often becomes urgent around a website project: a redesign by a new agency, a move from Magento to Shopify, or a domain change between .co.uk, .uk and .com. Migrations carry the most risk when URL changes are discovered late and redirects are written from memory. I benchmark the pages that currently earn traffic and inquiries, build a redirect map from real data, review the new build on staging and verify redirects, canonicals, tags and tracking on launch day.

Between projects, logs and Search Console show what crawlers actually do. If your host or CDN can export access logs, I separate genuine Googlebot and Bingbot requests from impostors and see how much of their attention reaches your key categories and service pages; if not, Search Console crawl stats give a partial view. Bing Webmaster Tools is worth verifying as well, since Bing results also appear through Microsoft products used on many office desktops.

I work alongside your agency rather than replacing it. Tickets describe the problem, the expected behavior and how to test it, and I join calls in UK working hours when questions arise. The SEO migration consulting page details the launch process, the UK SEO consulting page covers the wider strategy, and the contact page is the place to start a conversation about your site.